


built on the old rivers

by fartherfaster



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Lichtenberg Figures, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 01:25:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3550898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fartherfaster/pseuds/fartherfaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You catch her wrist and delicately kiss the bone of it. “Nothing to be sorry for,” you tell her. She composes her reality in absolutes and theories and the true phenomenal names of things. Colloquial language is not her means of communication. You like her hard lines, her curiosity, her determination. Jane would never call Mjolnir just a hammer, and that puts a small, needy part of you to rest.<br/>-<br/>There is a storm in the desert, and Thor comes to terms with all of his changes.<br/>-<br/>The one where human-Thor has Lichtenberg figures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	built on the old rivers

**Author's Note:**

> A little bit of introspection, a little bit of a character study, a little bit of porn.  
> -  
> Playing with the headcanon that Thor has Lichtenberg figures - scars caused by electrical discharge - _do not googleimages if this makes you nervous_ \- that first happened when he was a boy. His mother magicked him a glamour, which is why we never see them, but after his first few nights with Jane the magic disintegrates and they reappear. Please note, this piece contains _absolutely no painplay._

Jane leads you to the lounging chairs by the fireplace on your second night in her company, though it is far too cloudy to make out the unfamiliar constellations. She pulls the chairs close together, draws a blanket up over her knees, and looks over her shoulder expectantly at you. She doesn’t seem to heed the gathering storm. Maybe she cannot recognise it. She studies the stars, after all, not the clouds that stand in her way.

You lie down beside her, stretching out. It’s not big enough for you, but it serves. Jane tosses and rolls and huffs out a small, embarrassed little laugh when she catches you watching her, but she doesn’t blush. You extend your arm over her cushion, and she nestles her ear into the cup of your elbow, the same position you woke up in at dawn. Jane curls, very small, around herself. You tuck her blanket closer to her chin, tighter around her knees. This desert is very cold without its baking sun. You do not stoke the fire like you did last night. Jane does not sense the weather, but you know you’ll be rained out long before sunrise. The consequences posed by that single bed inside her small home will simply have to wait.

-

You wake up to the distant roll of thunder, and it is so unsettling that a shiver rolls up the length of your spine. Jane sleeps, undisturbed. The thunder rolls closer, and across the desert falls the susur of rain one hundred leagues away. You touch her cool cheek.

“Jane.”

She hums.

“Jane, we must get inside. There’s a storm.”

She hums again, and folds herself in more tightly to the warm hollow of your chest. One of her small hands curls into your thick coat, her skin chilled in comparison to yours. You shift your own blankets to cover her, shed your coat to shelter her shoulders, and stand.

You can see the storm, distant and outside of yourself, outside of your will, barrelling down the open desert. You can see where it sucks a vicious updraft, you can see the thunderhead growing. You used to thrive in that same place. You feel alien, and frightened. Never before could lightning have killed you. Now, you are unworthy of it. Now, all your old scars show like purple-red-white streams, starbursts at the high ridge of your shoulder, your elbow; a heavy knot of scarred tissue just at the softness where your ribs end. You can feel the scars inside there, too, threading through your muscles and bones. A thick, ropey white river travels the length of one thigh, down the back of your calf, blown out from your heel. The first time you touched the lightning you were just a boy. You healed. Your mother gave you a glamour to hide the scars. Undeserving of her, you must wear them now. The idea of Jane wearing similar scars fills you with fear. You move quickly.

Ducking inside her small home, you pull the mattress away from the walls. It is still grounded to the floor, but surely it was designed with insulation in mind? Surely, no one would build a tin can meant to _cook_ -

“Thor?”

Jane’s voice is a whisper outside. You follow. She peers blearily out from under the mass of blankets, her small fist closed around your coat at her chin, like a silly child’s play-pretend bonnet. She is not looking at you, but rather at her empty hand on the place where you were sleeping, by now cold with absence. Her shoulders hitch, and she lets the jacket fall away. You watch her convince herself that you were never real to begin with, that the last day and night haven’t even happened. Success is still her dream. She’s shaken by the thunder, and you can hear her curse herself for falling asleep outside.

You approach slowly, palms up. “Jane,” you say, and she wheels around to look at you, still sleep-muddled. You wrap the blankets around her like you’re swaddling a babe - at least, you imagine it, having never done so - and tell her, “Get inside. This weather is dangerous.”

The rain races across the sand towards you and you pray, you push with all your heart to convince it to wait, you beg it to stop; you don’t shout at the sky because you don’t want to frighten Jane but you feel even further gone from control now than when you were hurtling down the Bifrost. You ache with want to pull the reins on this storm but it is not yours, it doesn’t listen, it doesn’t hear you, and the water falls like fat gushing tears. You’re drenched, soaked down to your skin in an instant. Jane shrieks and you turn, but it appears she got inside before being splashed. You walk to the trailer slowly. You’re already wet. The thunder is building, still, you’ve got another ten heartbeats before it -

The booming crash is so close, so angry, that it steals your breath. You rush for the door like a child. You’ve never, not once, run from a fight. But this is not a fight. You are nothing but a man, and this is a storm, sitting maliciously on top of you.

You stand in the entryway of the trailer and peer out its small port-window. Jane has left the blankets in a heap on the middle of the bed, pushed back into place against the wall, and you are dripping on the floor. She comes out of the bathroom and laughs at you softly.

“You’re like a cartoon,” she says, “I’ve never seen rain start that fast, even out here.”

You shrug agreeably.

“Here,” she says, taking the dry towel from her shoulders. Her hair is only slightly damp, but it must chill against her bare shoulders. She has changed into clothes meant for sleeping; long, loose black pants and a thin black top made of nearly nothing. Her nipples show through, raised to delicate tips, and you avert your eyes to watch her hands, instead. She helps peel you out of your long shirt, but as it comes away she notices the scars down your forearms. They took time to come back - they weren’t there when she last saw you shirtless and unselfconscious. You don’t really know how you feel about them, now.

She focuses elsewhere, and pokes a toe on your boots. She puts your hand on her bare shoulder - her top has slipped precariously - and you pretend to use her for balance as you toe out of your drenched gear. Mostly, you touch where you are allowed.

“Lose the jeans, big guy,” she says, tone light. “There’s enough water in them for a fishtank. I’m sure I’ve got something else of Don’s kicking around here…” she turns away to the box of clothes brought back from the lab. You shed the jeans, the material stiff and cold, somewhat disgruntled that its sturdy versatility proves useless once wet. You leave on your smallclothes and sit on the edge of the bed, squeezing water out of your hair.

“This should f-” Jane’s voice falters when she turns back to face your. You know it’s not your state of undress, but the scars that have startled her. She drops the pants back in the box and walks in small steps towards you. You smile at her, unbothered. Jane is nothing less than a blessing, even as she looks at you curiously. You hope there will be stories that remember her as such. Maybe you’ll be the one to tell them.

“What happened?”

“They’re very old.”

“May I?” She holds out a single finger, to touch. “Do they hurt?”

Do they? “No, not anymore. You may,” you tell her, and you find it true. Your skin and muscles and bones do not ache with the same burn. Seeing them for the first time in centuries was jarring, but you had never really forgotten them. Your heart hurts instead, but it surely aches with something else. Jane traces a fingertip up the back of your hand, over the inside of your arm, up to the hollow of your elbow where she’d laid her head to sleep for two nights now. She switches from the smooth purpled ridge to the twisted, winding bump of the vein right beside it. You wonder why your musculature hasn’t changed, too, but this body, this physical man, seems to be yours.

“When did they…” she pauses, and makes the assessments in her head, “come back?”

“Some time in the night, yesterday, they must have. I didn’t think to pay attention.” You don’t tell her that you didn’t think they would ever come back. It was your mother’s magic that hid them the first time, your arrogant boyish pride in your looks had been as wounded as your skin. Your father had disagreed with it; had disagreed with your foolishness more. You wonder, if you’d worn - borne - those scars then as you were meant to, if things would’ve turned out the way they did. As it is now your mother has truly left you. Jane presses her hips into your knees, leans forward to wrap the towel over your shoulders and use its flapping ends to dry your hair.

“Are they Lichtenberg figures?” she asks quietly.

“I don’t know. What is Lichtenberg?”

Jane shakes her head and for a moment looks very frustrated with herself. “Of course you don’t, I’m sorry. He was a scientist who studied electricity. What I meant, I guess, are they from lightning?”

You catch her wrist and delicately kiss the bone of it. “Nothing to be sorry for,” you tell her. She composes her reality in absolutes and theories and the true phenomenal names of things. Colloquial language is not her means of communication. You like her hard lines, her curiosity, her determination. Jane would never call Mjolnir just a hammer, and that puts a small, needy part of you to rest. “It was a long time ago. I was a boy.”

Jane stops short and pokes your knee to see the far side of your thigh, where that perfectly white river runs thick and uninterrupted. “Did they grow with you?”

You’ve never thought about it. You pat your hand to your chest, where that heavy knot folds up under the softness beneath your ribs. You can feel, when you think about it, how the scarred tissues lace through your body, woven into your muscles and threaded between your bones. You were not so big the first time. You were just an angry, angry child, furious at the world for some personal injustice. The lightning, in the middle of your mother’s halls, had blown out of your body like it belonged in a thunderhead. You peel your shirt over your head - you feel a rush of warm air on your damp skin as you do - and take in the damage that has, absolutely, grown. You do not like the word scars. Jane calls them figures and figures are proof. But proof of what, you ask yourself. Proof that you are a man; nothing more or less than a man who has made mistakes and earned his scars in the learning. Somehow, that is better.

There is only one answer. Every time you summoned the lightning, it must have left a mark, built on the old rivers, your body nothing more than a conduit. The first time was painful, a forging. Thereafter it was exhilarating. The moment of swinging suspension was glory. Maybe it was Mjolnir that protected you.

“They must have,” you say quietly, Jane’s wrist still on your cheek. You can feel the flutter of her heart, small like a bird.

Your intimate moments with Sif are a hundred years behind you, and even then, she was never less than ruthless, less than victorious. You reveled in her fight. Your mother, too, has not touched you like this in many hundred years more, not since you were still in the throes of late boyhood. Jane, small Jane, leans her hips against your knees for balance as she touches your shoulder. Your throat is tight and you want to blame it on the dust, but the desert is being flooded by rain that buffets the trailer, rain that is not yours. This world is chaos and private passions, and now it is storming for no reason at all, the thunder's voice unclaimed.

Jane is neither Sif nor your mother. She is small and chaotic and she studies a science the rest of her world has forgotten to look for. She is slight and tender, beautiful in a way that arrests you. You kiss her wrist again, place your broad hand on her slim back, tracing the bumps of her spine. You wonder if her people are as dismissive of her as they are of her studies. The notion of her neglect hurts like your own. Jane is small - the bulk of your pressed-together thighs far exceeds the lean grace of her body - but she deserves to be noticed. She pushes between your knees gingerly and touches both your shoulders, her fingers finding the knots and ribbons of your scars, your figures. She traces the coarse stubble of your throat. You kiss her passing fingertips and she smiles. Jane is small in your arms - she lives small - but she has with authority paced herself under the vast enormity of this sky so she may pass judgement over it.

You’ve been inside the stars she studies, and they are whole nebulous worlds; she calls them gas _giants_. Your old self belonged there and would not fit in this home, in Jane’s arms. Perhaps you are smaller than your imagination made you believe. You must be now. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You were too big, but you were hollow, and you folded. No; your anger was too big. Your pride was too big. Old rivers you’d never thought to dam and dyke flooded you out. You did not fold. You fell.

A world of sorrows builds and releases in your chest, runs in tremors down to your feet, your fingertips. Jane watches you shiver, and you watch her breathe. When she inhales, her bones show their spaces, their joints and ridges. At the push of her exhale, you can see her heart beating where her skin is thinnest. You want to protect her, to lend her layers and scars of your own to save her the painful earning. You can see her heart, but you do not need that kind of proof. Jane has a heart bigger than yours, bigger than you. Maybe big enough to shelter you while the rain that isn’t yours - thunder that does not echo in your pulse - pours from the judicial heavens.

Jane looks at you before you realise you are ready to speak.

“I came from a place very far away,” you tell her. She, the scientist, who has been waiting days for your words. The scratches in her notebook, in your handwriting, are the barest of bones. “I don’t think I can ever go back.”

Jane folds you into her arms, threads her fingers through your damp hair in a pleasant, petting way. “I know,” she says, and nothing in you doubts her. You slide your hand down the length of her back and back up, catching the fabric of her loose top. She leans, arches, and ducks willingly as you pull the thin material away. Jane presses against you closer, and the bed shifts with your weight. You think about the consequences of this - you think how maybe you love Jane already, this willow woman, this oasis. Her motions are clean, certain. She encourages you to wrap your arms around her body, and then you turn, stretch, reach, and gently spread her out on the blankets piled on the bed.  You are -

“Jane,” you say, touching the ridge of her hip and pressing your nose into the soft spot where her ribs end, your lips on her skin like you could maybe kiss her with words. “I am-” S _orry? In love? Unworthy of you and of all your trust?_

Jane touches the back of your head. She does not look at you like you are unworthy. Jane looks at you like you are healing, and she knows at what cost.

-

Jane sleeps. You wake up when the thunder passes, the unpleasant buzz of foreign lightning finally leaving the air. It still rains - it rains like a flood - but the night is quiet. You pull a single blanket from the edge the discarded pile, and wrap it loosely over one shoulder and across your hips. You open the door and sit on the stoop, watching the world.

Jane wakes up. She sits up, and spotting you, pads over to lean in the doorway, unabashedly nude. You smile to think of desert receiving her beauty in some arcane blessing. You watch together the water torrent down from the sky for several minutes and Jane trails her hand in the ends of your hair, in the plaits behind your ears. Eventually, she descends into your lap, deciding that she would like you to watch her instead.

You push the blanket away and hold her up by her thighs as she guides you inside. She settles and you occupy your hands with her soft, endless skin. You mouth at her tender, upturned nipples, drag your chin over the thin skin of her sternum to hear her groan in delight. She meets you in a rising rhythm but you pull her knees out from under her because you can see the grating is already leaving bruises. It wrecks her balance, and she falls forward on your chest without her leverage. It also means that gravity has slipped her down those final few inches that neither of you were brave enough to push for, not earlier. Her heat makes you feel like an animal and you curl around her, your bared teeth pressed against the sweet swell of her breast. Jane pants for breath high in her chest.

“Oh, God,” she begs, clinging to your shoulders. Her hips rock and twitch desperately. “Please,” she asks you, “please touch me.”

You drag your thumb to where she is flushed, slick and swollen around you. You wrap your other hand around her hip. You rub tight circles into her skin, dragging your thumb over her little knot of nerves until the expression on her face passes from prayer to something like release. Jane lets out high, tender gasping sounds and leans back against your knees as she shakes, her thighs and belly shivering. You ease back for a moment, tracing  where she is stretched around you, and she jerks back into motion, wrapping her arms around your neck and rocking you deeper into her body.

“Jane,” you say, her name falling from your lips like she could save you, “Jane, Jane, my love, please.”

“Oh, God,” she sighs, her teeth on the shell of your ear. You want to tell her you are no god, not any more, but she has laced her fingers with yours and is trailing them through her slick to rub relief into her skin, and the following wave is enough to take you both.

“Oh God, oh please, Thor, Thor, Thor,” she whines, moans, shudders and shivers in your arms. The sounds that spill from your chest are unlike any you’ve heard yourself make, choking on something like a howl.

You wonder, as she pants into the warm skin of your shoulder and you feel the uncoiling heat of release, low in your belly, if this will be enough. You are not who you thought you were; you are not a god. But if Jane, Jane who is real and tangible and exquisite, can climb into your lap and pray your name, then maybe you are real, too.

 

 

 

 


End file.
